CES 2008: Disruptive tech for health, business and media

Open source software, personalized media, optical interconnects and reputation systems are among the disruptive innovations picked out by a panel of senior executives from companies including HP, Facebook and Sonic at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Owen Van Natta, Facebook's chief revenue officer, predicted that online identity systems would make information that's already available more relevant. "We need need to establish reputation systems, establish the credentials of people who are presenting content." He also acknowledged Facebook's debt to open source; "Mark Zuckerberg had $85 (£42.50) a month he could spend on hosting when he started Facebook; if he had to pay huge licensing fees it might not be here today."

HP's chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robison predicted home printing of books in the near term. Optical switching within processors will cut power usage, reduce heat and eliminate most of the latency on chips, but he believes this is still some years away.

Dave Habiger, chief executive of Sonic Solutions, pointed out that technology isn't the only source of innovation. Recent changes in US law mean that movie DVDs no longer have to be pressed at a plant before they can be sold or rented; a disc can now be legally be burned in a Blockbuster rental store or at a supermarket., in a throwback to the late 80s when computer game tapes would often be duplicated in-store.

This changes the economics of production and distribution so that it's no longer necessary to sell a minimum of 5,000 discs to break even, which means that many more than the 10 per cent of movies that currently make it to DVD could be available. You'll also be able to burn legal DVDs at home with the Qflix system Sonic announced at the show; this uses approved DVD media, burning software and Qflix DVD writers to burn copyright-protected DVDs from downloaded movies.

"You don't have the costs of taking that film out of the vault and re-encoding it; that content is already prepared", Habiger explained; "So you can say to consumers 'Buy this PC and you will be able to take advantage of them'. And now that the film is on my PC, it is very easy to stream it or to go and buy a $100 device from the PC manufacturer to watch it on my TV and it never hits a physical disc."

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